Police Brutality & Oppression (cont.)
In 1975 shortly after Jim Crow became history, the rate of black imprisonment sky rocketed, having been essentially constant for the previous five decades, while the rate of white imprisonment after 1975 rose only very slightly. The oppression of working class blacks after the success of thd Civil Rights Movement took a new form, and is arguably worse now than during the years of Jim Crow.
The purpose of this racial discrimination is divide-and-rule. The rulers of America want blacks and Hispanics to experience greater suffering at the hands of the police than whites. Why? So that whites will be susceptible to the mass media propaganda that portrays blacks and Hispanics as criminals and as people who complain about our society without justification; so that whites will fear and have contempt for blacks and Hispanics, and so that blacks and Hispanics will view whites as racists.
Cowing people of all races into submission to the "law and order" of the rich, and treating minorities the worst to divide and rule: this is why we are seeing so much police brutality and oppression, examples of which are here and here (with related video here) and here (with related article here) and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here (with accompanying article here) and here (with related article here) and here and here (a cop fired for NOT being a thug) and here and here and here and here. and here. This has been the role of police forces since their very beginning, as discussed in great historical detail here.
Postscript June 2020: Here are links to more articles and videos about ongoing police oppression, including attacks on people protesting against the police killing of George Floyd and racist policing in general: here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.
Minneapolis city council members called for DISBANDING (not reforming!) the police department, which is WONDERFUL!
Here's something else that is WONDERFUL!
Police Are Exceptionally Brutal in the United States
As discussed in this video and also here, the police in the United States, in sharp contrast to other nations, are a leading cause of civilian killings even though police officers, themselves, are at relatively little danger of death on the job (with most police deaths due to automobile accidents rather than hostile civilians) and in fact police are not even in the top ten list of most dangerous jobs. What's going on in the United States?
Part of the answer, reported in the Wall Street Journal here, is the following:
"Since the 1960s, in response to a range of perceived threats, law-enforcement agencies across the U.S., at every level of government, have been blurring the line between police officer and soldier. Driven by martial rhetoric and the availability of military-style equipment—from bayonets and M-16 rifles to armored personnel carriers—American police forces have often adopted a mind-set previously reserved for the battlefield. The war on drugs and, more recently, post-9/11 antiterrorism efforts have created a new figure on the U.S. scene: the warrior cop—armed to the teeth, ready to deal harshly with targeted wrongdoers, and a growing threat to familiar American liberties."
Why Our Police Are Being Trained in Israel
Of note, American senior law enforcement officials (as discussed here and here and here and here and here) are being trained by Israel's police, intelligence and counter terrorism forces. How come?
The Israeli government is the world's expert in removing unwanted people from where they are (were) living and making those who can't be moved as invisible as possible to the "right" inhabitants. The Israeli government violently drove out most of the non-Jews from the part of Palestine now called Israel, seized all of their property, and now refuses to let them return (click here to read why). This ethnic cleansing (not anti-Semitism) is why Palestinians are so angry at the Israeli government. The Israeli government and its ardent backers such as the ADL say that opposition to this ethnic cleansing is anti-Semitism and that armed resistance to it is "terrorism." The Israeli government's expertise in "fighting terrorism" is being shared with American police who are being used (in the name of the "broken windows" theory) to treat the poorest Americans and especially minority Americans in the same disgusting and brutal way that the Israeli government treats non-Jewish (Palestinian) people.
The way to end police brutality and oppression is to abolish the dictatorship of the rich that pays the police to serve them this way. And the way to abolish the dictatorship of the rich is an egalitarian revolution.
A FALSE Argument that Claims There Is Not Racially Biased (Against Non-Whites) Fatal Shooting by Police
Some people make a false argument that claims there is not racially biased (against non-whites) fatal shooting by police. The argument consists in asserting that while indeed non-whites are killed by police more often (disproportionately to their percentage of the general population) than whites, the explanation is not racially biased policing but simply that non-whites engage in more criminal behavior. As supposed evidence for the absence of police racial bias against non-whites, the argument compares the following two proportions:
#1. The proportion of encounters between police and non-white civilians that resulted in the police killing the civilian;
#2. The proportion of encounters between police and white civilians that resulted in the police killing the civilian.
The fact is that the #1 proportion is actually LESS than the #2 proportion. On the surface this would seem to suggest that if there is any racial bias at all, it is bias against whites, not against non-whites.
But there is a flaw in the above "argument." The argument does not take into account that there are different kinds of encounters with police and their likelihood differs by race. Here is why this is important.
Some encounters--let's call them the "dangerous" kind--involve violent behavior by the civilian that is very likely to result in the police killing the civilian. And some encounters--let's call them the "not dangerous" kind--,in contrast, involve non-violent behavior by the civilian that is very unlikely to result in the police killing the civilian. It turns out that--due to racially biased policing such as the "broken windows" policy implemented in mainly non-white parts of our cities--blacks are more often (disproportionately to their percentage of the general population) involved in "not dangerous" encounters with the police, encounters that are unlikely to result in the police killing the civilian.
Since there are disproportionately more "not dangerous" non-white encounters with the police, and these encounters seldom result in the killing of the civilian, it means that proportion #1 above will actually be lower than otherwise due to racial bias against non-whites. Here's why.
This proportion, recall, is a fraction the denominator (the bottom number) of which is the total number of encounters between a non-white person and the police, and the numerator (the top number) of which is only the number of such encounters in which the civilian is killed by the police.
Note that racially biased ("broken windows", etc.) policing increases the denominator of proportion #1 with the kind of encounters that do not also increase the numerator. This makes proportion #1 lower than it would be in the absence of such racially biased policing.
Thus the fact that proportion #1 is lower than proportion #2 is actually an indication that the police are racially biased against non-whites, which is the opposite of what those denying racially biased policing claim.
To read more about this, see the Boston Globe article here (which you may have to subscribe to that newspaper to read, unfortunately.)
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To read about the history of police in the United States, click here and also here and here and here.
Read about why abolishing the police is a good idea here.
Read about what people do WITHOUT the police, here.